as a kid, the impregnated by a shower of gold rain boggled my mind. What?

oooh. This.

kjohnson1585, sorry, but your description sounds like half the novels written in children's/YA in the past 30 years. (A recent good novel with this theme is the recent Newbery winner, When You Reach Me, which riffs brilliantly off A Wrinkle in Time.)

The '70s miniseries with Alec ("genuine class") Guinness is indeed better than the recent movie; it's more fleshed out, it breathes and moves at a snail's pace, and the atmosphere is fucking dead-on. It also has surprising depths of emotion for a movie about a bunch of dried up British old-boy spies.

Oh, I love the book almost as much as the movie. Both are note-perfect genre exercises that have really subtle psychological details about human behavior that elevate the exercise.

Ditto, profdragon. I can deal with the change of dialogue, but Keira Knightley is NOT Lizzy Bennet.

"Indeed, in an evaluation of 153 studies that looked at the psychological profiles of those reported by their teachers to be bullies, victims or bully-victims, […] found that all those groups were more likely to test poorly on measures of social competence, self-awareness and emotion regulation than were children who…

LOVE The Grifters; seeing that movie is what moved me to start reading Jim Thompson. Frears also did Dangerous Liaisons, which adapted the French classic Les Liaisons dangereuses beautifully, though when I later read the novel, I was surprised by how much complexity (of the philosophizing about male/female relations,…

Actually, Henry James (a writer I was semi-obsessed with in high school/college, and still love today) has had his share of great adaptations.

My go-to for this category is always Silence of the Lambs. Both the novel and the film are perfectly congruent; Demme's film manages to perfectly capture the spirit and detail of Thomas Harris's novel in a cinematic way.

Gregor the Overlander series is incredibly bleak, yes. I mean, the implications about genocide and biological warfare ALONE raised my eyebrows because those books are aimed at an even younger audience.

Part of the crazy amounts of money it made is due to how good the North American box office has been this year. It's March and there is no precedent for a movie opening this huge in a non-summer month, but it exceeded expectations by 30% or more, simply because Americans (and Canadians?) are in a moviegoing mood in…

I'm rolling my eyes so hard. You know, I keep track of children's and YA lit for work, and I've realized that I prefer books published for children over fiction for adults these days.

I love Do the Right Thing — though it's been several years since I've seen it, and I do agree with the primary message of the movie, because it's a primal rage scream of a movie, a battle cry and not a preacher's plea from the pulpit — and 25th Hour, though the latter movie has a minor flaw in its central plot that…

That is pretty much the reaction of me and the three people I went with; it's so competently, respectfully done and not terrible that we couldn't tear the movie apart. So we hung out after and ate popcorn chicken trying to dissect the movie vs. book.

From Freeway: sexo, which is Spanish for "sex." Thanks, Reese Witherspoon's character for trawling for johns in a bilingual neighborhood.

Meh. You're missing out. Most literary books written for adults today are (in my opinion) mediocre and aimless, while many books for kids and teens today are fleet and gripping entertainment.

I don't get nauseous from gore or horrific violence — I either laugh or look away. There are just many, many things that I know I'll never be able to un-see, so why watch?

I was excited reading this review until I got to the line about House of Mirth. I can't help but judge the movie against the Wharton novel; it changed just things enough to undercut the story's true tragedy and soften the heroine to make her less unlikable. And, much as I love Gillian Anderson, she was mis-cast as…

I live in San Fran and you are both incorrect, San Francisco does not suck.